Skip to main content

The Strength of Tradition

I've been meaning to point out this column by David Warren, who's stuff is always very good. It just dawned on me that I can use it to further explain my post yesterday on the controversy at the Toronto Film Festival. A big quote follows (emphasis mine):

A great advantage of this Christian worldview -- on which our State and nation were founded, and which was once taught in our schools and upheld in law -- was its internal coherence. The greatest minds through twenty centuries had thought through the legal implications, but more profoundly, "discovered" layer behind layer of morality, written into nature. There is a moral order in the world, a law behind human law, and indeed all the "great religions" allow that good is good, and evil evil. Today, none of this is possible, for Christian or any other religious reasoning is ruled out of court, and all judgments must stand or fall on "pure reason". Which is a problem, because pure reason is no more apparent than God or the human soul. Which is to say, absolutely obvious to the eyes of faith, and otherwise invisible. The removal of the postulated God and human soul from public philosophy thus leaves a system of legal reasoning that makes no sense. We have, in effect, a worldview that makes "demonization" illegal, but cannot acknowledge the defining demon. Meanwhile it invents new crimes, and forgets old ones, while flailing about in the de-oxygenated chamber of "pure reason". There were many random directions we could have gone, after the supply of oxygen was cut off, but the one we seem to have hit upon is to define "crime" as belief in the existence of crime itself. The worst human deed is now to demonize something -- a person, group, practice, object, whim, or ... anything at all.
This is exactly right. We are now headed to a place where we have to defend finding a discussion of cat killing offensive, even evil (The film "Casuistry" at the Toronto Film Festival). We have to defend wanting to keep children away from adults who want to drug them and molest them (Robin Sharpe). We have to defend the notion that Criminals should not be allowed to threaten members of the public while in jail (Mark Emory). We have to defend these positions anew because we can't seem to allow ourselves to use tradition as a defense anymore. This is not to say that changes are not possible, but any science student knows that in an experiment you alter only one variable at a time. Otherwise there's no way to follow the chain of causation. Not that science is a model for social issues anyway. Controlling the variables on a society wide scale would involve coercion beyond toleration and (thank goodness) our abilities. Tradition means evolved solutions to social problems. The idea that we can think up "perfect" solutions is childish, reckless and dangerous. Change must be evolutionary, not revolutionary, or we risk not knowing up from down. We run the of risk having to re-build the wheel, if we can.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reuters joins CNN on the bench

Makes room for CanWest to join the majors Kudos to CanWest for calling a terrorist a terrorist . Many, including The Last Amazon , will be happy to hear it. Reuters is among the worst of the major western news services, where I would also place the BBC and the CBC. Unsurprisingly, Reuters is not happy about the changes CanWest made to Reuters wire stories: Our editorial policy is that we don't use emotive words when labeling someone," said David A. Schlesinger, Reuters' global managing editor. "Any paper can change copy and do whatever they want. But if a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they remove the byline." Mr. Schlesinger said he was concerned that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations. "My goal is to protect ...

Wordpress

My move to Mac has been very happy except for two issues - gaming and blogging. For websurfing and multimedia, a Mac is of course a terrific machine. Games on the Mac platform are often ports of games made for the larger PC market and that means a Mac gamer will have to wait for the port. I'm not a heavy gamer by any means but I am very happy that the Mac port of Civilization 4 is finally here. Well, my copy isn't here quite yet - but it has been ordered and ought to be here soon. The blogging issue is more complicated. I'm not fond of writing my posts in a browser window. This goes back to when I was first blogging and I lost one or two large posts into the ether. After that I moved to w.bloggar - a great little app that let me compose on my desktop and then click send when all was said and done. I have not been able to recreate that experience on my Mac, and not for a lack of trying! I looked at Marsedit , but that forces you to compse while staring at a bunch of HMT...

"A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard"

This article argues that universities are obsolete . Herman Melville said that "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Melville didn't need college to write "Moby Dick." He needed to read and spend time in the world. Before sailing out on a whaler in 1841, he had already worked on his uncle's farm and as a cabin boy on a ship to England. Peter Drucker urged high-school graduates to do likewise: Work for at least five years. If they went on to college, it would be as grown-ups. You wonder whether colleges, stripped of their education function, wouldn't find other lives as spas, professional-sports franchises or perhaps lightly supervised halfway houses for post-adolescents. The infrastructure is already in place. Putting aside the intellectual class' obsession with things passing and thus bringing the great moment of cosmic progression to a thundering conclusion (yawn), I do think there's something to this. The potential of the podcas...